NZA Weird over at Hard Avenue was given the opportunity to ask Tero Sarkkinen's, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Futuremark their thoughts regarding nVidia's recent claims about FutureMark's claims of nVidia cheating in 3DMark2003 with their newest driver set which was released last week.

Tero Sarkkinen: Any suggestion that Futuremark would intentionally penalize or favor any specific hardware in our products is absurd and NOT TRUE. And please note that we are not attacking here, we are just defending our product.

We are in the business of making objective benchmarks and we intend to keep it that way. We respect deeply our BETA members, which include the biggest in the industry, and they all have participated in the development of 3DMark03. NVIDIA themselves was an active member of the BETA program until December 2002.

Personally it seems FutureMark is upset or disgusted at nVidia since the company did not spend the enormous amount of money in being part of the 3DMark Beta Program. You would not expect FutureMark to make the claims they did, so publicly, without first discussing the issue with nVidia and at very least trying to working something out before making such threatening claims about nVidia drivers which could potentially hurt the company a lot.

Even though nVidia tweaked specific parts of their drivers to operate more effectively under 3DMark2003, wouldn't that mean that it would increase performance in games which rely on specific parts of those drivers and thus represent a similar result increase in FPS under 3DMark2003 and other newish games? Even so, is it a high crime for nVidia, or any other GPU maker, to optimize their drivers to perform better?

It is my opinion that they are entitled to and both companies should put their gloves down and continue making great products like they both do.